[Starlink] Re: Starlink D2D observation - fwiw

[J Pan <Pan@uvic.ca>]

oh, take care. you could help us do some more in-depth tests on dtc as
well. safety first!
--
J Pan, UVic CSc, ECS566, 250-472-5796 (NO VM), Pan@UVic.CA, Web.UVic.CA/~pan

On Wed, Feb 25, 2026 at 7:43 PM Ulrich Speidel via Starlink
<starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
> Last week, I found myself driving into a disaster area - I was on leave
> and the southern North Island of NZ got hit by the worst weather in
> three years (since Cyclone Gabrielle, basically). We were booked to stay
> for a few nights at a Department of Conservation (DOC) lodge in a remote
> valley north of Palmerston North.
>
> Access roads to the area are all precarious - potential for slips,
> flooding, washouts, bridge damage are ubiquitous there.
>
> My initial fears that we might have to flee the place overnight were
> assuaged the moment I saw that the lodge was well above river level. To
> our surprise, there was 4G terrestrial coverage also. The lodge has
> mains power, too. On site: My wife, me, a Kiwi tramper, and two French
> cyclists.
>
> Forecast was for 140-180 mm (~6-7 inches) of rain overnight. So we
> weren't overly surprised to find that the lodge had no power when we
> woke up in the morning. We also soon found out that the 4G coverage had
> gone. We had a mains+battery-operated fridge for food with us and a bit
> of battery lighting, and there was a woodfire for warmth and cooking,
> alas it initially appeared that we would have no water - the rainwater
> tanks only release their treasure via pump... until we discovered a
> hidden tap later in the day.
>
> After breakfast, the local farmer from up the road turned up to let us
> know that all roads out were blocked. He is also a radio ham and had
> limited UHF comms out. At that point, I discovered that my phone now
> showed One NZ SpaceX as the network - even though I don't have a
> compatible plan. So it appears that One NZ turned the service on in the
> disaster area (which is very sparsely populated).
>
> The service appeared to be text only (no WhatsApp or anything IP-based
> worked). My phone (Samsung A56) was the only one of five in the lodge
> that worked with the service, similarly, among three phones in the
> farmer's household, only one - a recent iPhone - worked. Sending a text
> message took around a minute each. I only sent a few - to our emergency
> contact, a friend who we'd said we'd go visit the next day, and one on
> behalf of one of the other lodge guests. So it's a small data set.
>
> As expected, coverage was much better outdoors, although it seemed to
> occasionally manage to pick up the network through a window as well.
> Sending text from indoors didn't work for me at all. But having that
> option was nice.
>
> One road opened again the next morning, and the power came back on later
> that day, along with the 4G coverage.
>
> --
> ****************************************************************
> Dr. Ulrich Speidel
>
> School of Computer Science
>
> Room 303S.594 (City Campus)
>
> The University of Auckland
> u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz
> http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
> ****************************************************************
>
>
>
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